Leveraging agrobiodiversity: A recipe for food forever and happily ever after

Photo by Xochiquetzal Fonseca/CIMMYT via Flickr.

“Variety is the very spice of life, which gives it all its flavour” wrote William Cowper in his poem “TheTask”.

Endless repetition gets very boring and even depressing, at least it gets for me. And who doesn’t like to try something new every once in a while? In fact, our brain develops better in a diverse and dynamic environment. Leveraging diversity enables us to accomplish great things together, doing it with excitement and fascination.

So why then have we been persistently getting rid of diversity in our food? It is hard to comprehend the fact that out of more than 5000 crops used for food throughout history only 12, along with five animal species, provide 75% of the world’s food today. And only three crops – maize, rice and wheat – provide more than a half of all the world’s calories from plants. No wonder our food system is at risk of breaking down.

A number of new initiatives are emerging to try to change the situation. Seed banks, plant-breeding programs, and organizations promoting crop diversity are part of piecemeal efforts to expand the varieties of foods in an increasingly unified and globalized food chain. These efforts have the potential to expand access to more nutritious food, to protect against crop diseases, and to explore the cultivation of native crops that may be more suitable to given local growing conditions.